Description This screenshot shows of the new terrain terrain renderer of the Genesis Device Engine. The goal of this engine is to create a opensource 3d engine similar to the battlefield 2 engine.

The terrain is generated using a heightmap texture. This is subdivided into patches of 512 triangles. A Quadtree is created of the patches to speed op the rendering. Also we use an occlusion algoritm to filter out hiden patches of terrain. Each patch has a different color texture that can be applied to it. Also it supports detailed texturing though the a second texture unit. We don`t use any fancy LOD system because we want to keep the source as clean and simple as positble. This demo is using a heightmap of 1024*1024 and a color texture source of 4098*4098. Because we have a limited line of view we use fog to blend the fading terrain with the skydome.

For rendering we use Opengl. Each patch is stored in a displaylist while rendering the patch in Triangle strip mode. This system is pretty simple and gives awsome result. In the demo of the screen we have 25000 to 40000 triangles visible on most times and we get 600 to 950 fps on a geforce 6800. We experimented with more extended viewlines, pushing the number of polygons to half a million, still running at 40 to 70 fps. Even a Geforce 1 runs 80000 triangles smoothly with 100 to 150 fps

Some features we are working on currently are: * realtime reflective water with distortion * animated skys for the skydome * bumpmapping for the terrain * foliage

Nice, but slow, rendring at 10 FPS on machine with Intel Extreme 2 graphics card (1024x768x32). Who cares, you say? Well, GC like this one is taking more or less 50% of the market. [snapback]19174[/snapback]

That maybe true but no serious gamer today is using these onboard intel graphics cards. Also the engine is designed for a Geforce 3 or Radeon 8500 32 mb minimem. This because the engine will make intense use of shaders for water, bumpmapping enz. We got 150 to 200 fps on a PIII 500 mhz with a geforce 1.

SpreeTree
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2005-07-22T10:30:59Z —
#4

I have an intel on board graphics card, and I'm a serious gamer (though I tend to play game like Civ and Total War instead, which arn't as intensive).

I am not slating your design though, if your minimum spec is what you have stated, the people with specs below that will just have to lump it. Its how the PC world works, unfortunatly.

Having said that, I would like to play BattleField 2 on my laptop... Dream on!

Spree

Luuk_van_Venrooij
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2005-07-22T12:35:39Z —
#5

Indeed dream on:). Also I was talking about the FPS genre in general. Almost every game released in the past year need a gf3 or better:)

Nautilus
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2005-07-22T17:06:36Z —
#6

I downloaded the demo available on your website (TerrainDemo1.zip). Runs ok at 1024x768x32, fullscreen, no VSync. I got an average fps ranging from 150 (at the starting point) to more than 210 (when approaching the borders).

Question 2: Considering the textures you used, how would be best converted the distance that separates two vertices in your demo, into a real-world length measure? (example: 1 Unit = 1 Meter)

Question 3: How far is set the far clipping plane in your demo?

Finally I noticed a weird... trembling... happening along the landscape borders, far away, where the landscape is supposed to fade out because of the fog. It looked like Z-fighting at first, but switching to wireframe showed that some parts of the landscape edge (far away from my position) were being drawn and then not drawn. This thing happened continuosly, as if two slightly different scenes were being rendered at intermittence :huh: